[Quote No.26399] Need Area: Friends > Friends "Do not restrict yourself to having a deep affection for just a few individuals; allow your heart to develop a gentle affection for people with whom events, habits, your tastes and your occupations bring you into contact.
Give the people you employ or who have pledged their services to you a share of the preferential feelings which are midway between friendship and the simple benevolence by which nature has linked us to every member of our species.
These feelings calm and refresh the soul, which at times can be tired or agitated by too vivid affections. By shielding us from too exclusive affection, they protect us from the mistakes and the harm which excess might cause. Fate can take our friends, our relations and all we hold dearest. We can be condemned to outlive them or to suffer from their indifference or their injustice. Our souls react violently to the very idea of replacing them, but while these feelings, which are to some extent secondary, do not fill the void, they do prevent us from feeling its true extent. They do not compensate, they do not even console; but they take the edge off the pain, they soothe our regrets and help time change
them into the calm, habitual sadness which becomes almost pleasurable to souls which have become closed to the pleasure of happier feelings." - Marquis de Condorcet(1743-1794), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, French philosopher, mathematician, social scientist, economist, gentleman, politician and humanitarian. From his ‘Advice To My Daughter’, which was written in 1794, for his daughter who was born in 1790 and sent to the country with his wife for safety during his leading role in the French Revolution.
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